Marija Verner

How do Indigenous peoples across Latin America participate in politics and what explains it? More than 500 Indigenous groups have experienced repression and attempts at erasure. Still, Indigenous communities persist and are politically active. We argue that structural and institutional factors within democracy do not fully explain Indigenous political engagement: they miss important dynamics within communities, where activism is often locally focused, rooted in community organizations, and focused on high-salience issues. Using the AmericasBarometer survey (17 countries, 2004–2019) we show that Indigenous people vote at equal levels to other citizens, and protest, contact government, join parties, campaign, and discuss politics more than non-Indigenous people. Variation in voting can be partially explained by Indigenous population size, but Indigenous people tend to participate at high levels in local and non-voting political activities regardless of population size. Associational participation is one mechanism that helps shape other diverse forms of Indigenous political action.

When and why do economic grievances result in support for populist parties? We address a long-standing puzzle in understanding populist voters. Existing studies have produced mixed results about how economic characteristics drive support for populist parties. We argue this is because scholars have overlooked the central importance of internal political efficacy, i.e., a belief in one’s ability to affect political outcomes. Using three pooled waves of the European Social Survey (ESS 2014, 2016, and 2018) with over 80,000 individual observations over time, we find that the economic determinants of populist support are contingent on internal political efficacy. Although there are reasons to think that the combined effect of economic circumstances and efficacy may be stronger on support for the populist left because of their stronger emphasis on social justice, we do not find evidence of this with the limited observations of the populist left in our sample. Critically, our findings contrast with the simplified and theoretically unsatisfying explanations of populist support we often encounter in the literature that are based solely on economic dissatisfaction. Instead, our results imply that recent trends in European politics are not only about economic issues but also about a voter’s belief in having agency and competence to affect change.

Could an individual’s perception of the possibility of a future ecological crisis be linked to their level of political trust? Studies of environmental attitudes have identified political trust as an important predictor of support for environmental taxation or risk perceptions surrounding specific local environmental hazards, but less is known about its role when environmental risks are perceived as diffuse and distant. Using original survey data from Ecuador, this article finds that political distrust predicts heightened ecological crisis perceptions and that higher educational attainment intensifies this relationship. A follow-up analysis of the AmericasBarometer’s Ecuador survey shows that political distrust also predicts higher concern about climate change. These findings suggest that when evaluations of political institutions reflect perceptions of environmental risks, individuals blame the government for environmental failures. The implications of this study are particularly relevant for political institutions in developing economies, where the public sector often spearheads development efforts.